Chapter III

The Breath of Greater Life

T

HE TURN of poetry in the age which we have now left
behind, was, as was inevitable in a reign of dominant in-
tellectuality, a preoccupation with reflective thought and
therefore with truth, but it was not at its core and in its essence a
poetic thought and truth and its expression, however artistically
dressed with image and turn or enforced by strong or dexterous
phrase, however frequently searching, apt or picturesque, had
not often, except in one or two exceptional voices, the most
moving and intimate tones of poetry. The poets of the mid-
dle nineteenth century in England and America philosophised,
moralised or criticised life in energetic and telling or beautiful
and attractive or competent and cultured verse; but they did
not represent life with success or interpret it with high poetic
power or inspired insight and were not stirred and uplifted by
any deeply great vision of truth. The reasoning and observing
intellect is a most necessary and serviceable instrument, but an
excess of reason and intellectuality does not create an atmo-
sphere favourable to moved vision and the uplifting breath of
life, and for all its great stir of progress and discovery that
age, the carnival of industry and science, gives us who are in
search of more living, inner and potent things the impression of
a brazen flavour, a heavy air, an inhibition of the greater creative
movements, a level spirit of utility and prose. The few poets who
strained towards a nearer hold upon life, had to struggle against
this atmosphere which weighed upon their mind and clogged
their breath. Whitman, striving by stress of thought towards a
greater truth of the soul and life, found refuge in a revolutionary
breaking out into new anarchic forms, a vindication of freedom
of movement which unfortunately at its ordinary levels brings us
nearer to the earth and not higher up towards a more illumined
air; Swinburne, excited by the lyric fire within him, had too